Developer Diaries

Star Wars Battlefront II Dev Diary # 3

Game Designer Joe Shackelford guides us through Battlefront's space combat.

Hi, I'm Joe Shackelford, a friendly and portly game designer. I was tasked with making space combat fun and engaging for Star Wars Battlefront II. Despite my kicking and screaming, I had to actually "work." In all honesty, it was a difficult job to bring the open-ended aspect of Battlefront into space, but I think we succeeded.

SPACE! With that one word, we do away with TIE fighters smashing into the sarlacc pit and allow the player to instead smash into asteroids, space debris, frigates, other fighters and full-scale Star Destroyers. With so much to hit, you'd almost miss the pure vastness of space that's all around you. Yes, my friends, we are free to roam across the galaxy and engage the enemy in 360 degrees of mayhem.

So, let me run down what you could do in a game of "Space Assault" in Star Wars Battlefront II. You'll spawn in a capital ship, then do whatever you want from there: go to a console to control the turrets mounted on the outside of a capital ship, run into the hangar and grab an A-wing, fly to a Star Destroyer (dogfighting all along the way, mind you), land in its hangar, shoot some poor fools who didn't expect someone to be shooting them on foot, then go blow crap up in their critical systems room. Oh yeah -- and all of this can be done offline, online, and split-screen.

One of the challenges we faced when creating the Space single-player levels was simply starting. But we had to start somewhere, so we began with the basics. We have four flyer types per side: Scouts, Multi-Role Fighters, Bombers, and Transports. For example, the Republic ships are the Episode III Jedi starfighter (also known as the Jedi interceptor), the ARC-170, V-wing, and the LAAT gunship.

Defining the roles and balance of these ships were crucial to ensuring the space maps would be able to hold their own in a primarily ground-based game. Our balance guru, Dan Nanni, burned that midnight (and midday) oil to ensure that even though each side has the same four archetypes, each ship type feels different depending on the faction you play. In regards to the feel and control of the fighters, we also introduced the ability to roll in our spacecraft. The freedom to truly engage in a 360-degree dogfight is something that was sorely missing from the first Battlefront.